Kala Pani – Black Water
The trip to the Port Blair ,Andaman did not start of on a pleasant note,with the aircraft returning on two days without landing because of gale force winds.On return to Chennai I heard there was an earthquake of 7.2 on the richter scale in the A&N islands.
Land we did on the third day, and for the next two days after concluding our business for which we had come, I visited the Cellular jail which was called Kala Pani……..(Black Water)
It was so named during the British days ,because , people who went there almost never returned.The only way to reach those islands was by sea , which was invariably rough.
The Andaman & Nicobar islands consist of over 700 islands out of which only about 58 islands are occupied today In those days lesser islands were occupied, and some of them by a tribe with canabalistic tendencies.
The A&N islands are very close to
Indian shores.
The jail came to be known as the Cellular jail because it had six wings which converged to a centre like hub and spoke.
The British patterned this Cellular jail on the famous French Devils Island which was made famous in the novel “Papillon” .I entered the Cellular jail as it is otherwise called with with mixed feelings, for here lay the brave souls who were the harbingers of our freedom.They wrote off their lives, living a miserable life in these jails.
The list of the people who were imprisoned there in the late thirties ( 1935 onwards) were imprinted on the walls. They had spent the best years of their lives in the prison.The huge list of Bengalis , Punjabis and others ran into many walls. There were even some ladies. When one saw the size of the cells, with only a window through which one could see a bit of the sky and live out their lives, with their hands and feet shackled. One could only imagine , the misery with a bucket of excreta and urine lying in a corner.
All the cells were in a row and a corridor stretched into the way beyond, and I almost heard the boots of the white guards as they walked through these corridors.
The prisoners could also bear silent witness to the lashing of the whip as it fell on bare bodies, mounted on a special stand, for mistakes knowingly or unknowingly committed. There is even a gutter where the blood from the whippings or the urine could flow when the bladder burst through fear.
Next to it lies the gallows where many were hung, and I wondered whether their souls were still hanging round the place.
The cell of Veer Sarvarkar,who was interned in this jail for the best part of 10 years bore a silent witness to the recent controversy surrounding some memorial inside the jail.
Today with the freedom gained through the death of such great souls, our so called leaders and politicians now loot the country while quoting, garlanding and talking of these very same freedom fighters….
May their souls rest in peace……
